Marshall Crenshaw takes it slow and easy

The pop misfit

Three years have passed since Marshall Crenshaw put out an album of new songs. Surely something's in the oven.

"Lemme think," he says. "Umm, no."

He's lying. Kind of. Sunday Blues, a song he labored over, finally seems ready for the world. It's likely to find its way into Crenshaw's set tonight at the Continental Club.

"I struggled to get that one finished. It took six weeks to get all the syllables glued to the melody just right," he says.

So says Crenshaw, 52, who for a quarter century has been one of pop's finest craftsmen, a meticulous writer who puts clever lyrics to memorable melodies. Strangely, he's also clunker free; his last album, 2003's What's in the Bag?, was a fine addition to Crenshaw's nine-album discography. A sluggish pace is the price listeners must pay.

Crenshaw's also one of pop's great misfits. He grew up in Detroit, a city with a rich musical past that includes great soul (Motown), soulful rock (Bob Seger) and rap and rap/rock (Eminem, Kid Rock) — but not necessarily smart, hooky pop.

Besides sounding nothing like Detroit's other great music-makers, Crenshaw admits his musical skull didn't really start to harden until he left Motor City in the mid-'70s. He did the bar circuit around Los Angeles and got his first break doing Beatlemania, a Beatles revue (he was John) in New York.

Having gone from understudy to star, Crenshaw was ready to step out on his own.

In an era of glam-pop, early MTV, teased hair and mascara, he shed the Lennon duds for geeky glasses and a buzz cut.

"I don't really remember hearing any criticism about the way I looked," he says. "Though the other day I was transferring video tapes to DVD, just to get rid of some junk, and I stumbled across a performance we did at a premiere party for La Bamba. (Crenshaw played Buddy Holly in the 1987 film.) I thought we were pretty (expletive) cool and sounded great."

But in 1982, big singles were served up by the likes of Toni Basil and the Human League. Crenshaw somehow eked out a Top 40 hit with Someday, Someway.

That song appeared on Crenshaw's self-titled first album, a set of songs that fused his Beatles education with a love of '70s R&B. It was followed a year later by the nearly as good Field Day. His pace has slowed since then, but Crenshaw's albums have always been worth the wait, particularly mid-era standouts such as the amped up Life's Too Short (1991) and the great guitar workouts that added fire to 1999's #447.

So it's only a matter of time until there's a new set of Marshall Crenshaw songs that could pull in the audience he's inexplicably missed for the years and years since that one taste of pop success. It should be any day now ...

"Oh, so what, let's just guess," he says when pressed. "Twelve months from now, I'll mostly be done with a new album. I hope."